After Ceuta
Most who entered Ceuta had returned to Morocco within two days. Online, the event was becoming something much larger: proof of replacement, civilisational collapse and the coming war for Europe.
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By Saturday, the invasion of Ceuta had almost entirely left Ceuta.
Practically all of the estimated 60,000 people who entered the Spanish territory had returned to Morocco. Not one had reached mainland Spain or travelled onwards into the European Union. Some were escorted back by soldiers. Others returned because they were hungry, exhausted and sleeping in the street. The route they had imagined opening before them ended a few miles from where it began.
Sixty-seven people had died.
That should have changed the story. It did not. While the migrants were walking back towards Morocco, the invasion was moving in the other direction. It reached Washington and London, then spread through the online networks that have spent years waiting for exactly these images.
The people went home. The invaders stayed.
Donald Trump introduced it at a cabinet meeting. He had watched the “catastrophe” in Spain. It looked, he said, like “an invasion of a country”. Then came the number: “Hundreds of thousands of people.”
The estimate was 60,000, which was already quite enough. Trump enlarged it because the number had ceased to describe an event. It had become atmosphere.
He then brought the invasion across the Atlantic. The same thing would happen in America, only worse, if Republicans lost the midterm elections. JD Vance called the scenes proof of “radical left-wing globalist policies” and the “Invasion of the West”. Mike Johnson called it “Marxism in practice”. The State Department blamed the Spanish government and announced that Spain would not have this problem if it had its own President Trump.
The geography troubled many. Ceuta is separated from mainland Spain by the Strait of Gibraltar. A nine mile swim on a good day. It is also outside the normal arrangements of the Schengen travel area. Reaching Ceuta does not provide an open ticket to Europe. By the time you read this, the Spanish authorities will have returned nearly everyone.
The Independent called Trump’s intervention a distraction from the serious issue of migration. That is not quite right. Trump was showing how the crisis would be used for a domestic audience.
He looked at Ceuta and saw the American midterms. Vance saw the fall of the West. Elon Musk saw World War Z. British commentators saw the chance to settle arguments they had been having for years.
Brendan O’Neill declared that Spain had been invaded and that there was “no other way to put it”. The migrants had “swarmed”, “stormed” and “colonised” Spanish territory. They were “cocky, often hostile men from afar”. The real breakthrough, for O’Neill, was linguistic. Ceuta had finally freed him to say “invasion” without being reprimanded by the left.
Much of his article was not about Spain. It was about Nigel Farage being criticised for saying “swarm”, Jim Ratcliffe being criticised for saying Britain was being colonised, and the alleged persecution of anyone who had ever used the phrase “illegal immigrant”. The deaths in Ceuta became a vindication for British men who believe they have been unfairly corrected.
O’Neill began with an event in North Africa and ended with Pakistani grooming gangs, the small boats in the Channel and the safety of British women. Ceuta did not lead him there. He brought all that with him.
David Goodhart was more restrained, though he too began with Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, the 1973 novel in which France, and then Europe, collapses before a mass arrival from the Global South. Perhaps he was one of the “chuds” Vauban Books had in mind in a later post on X. Goodhart called the resemblance “eerie”. Others were less cautious.
Vauban Books quoted Raspail directly. The wealthy nations, the passage claimed, had constructed a prison around the Third World, and now that prison was “peacefully rising in revolt”. Another post reproduced a summary from Nicholas P. Pinkoski’s introduction to the book. In this version, the migrants do not merely arrive. European government collapses. Citizens withdraw from public life. Dictators and Brahmins take power in France. The wretchedness of the Third World becomes global.
Richard Ekins and Guglielmo Verdirame used the crisis to continue Policy Exchange’s campaign against the Strasbourg court. Their argument began with a narrow Spanish Supreme Court decision about whether legislation covering physical border barriers could also apply to people who swam around them. By the end, Britain was being urged to lead a European confrontation with human rights law.
Each article arrived with its conclusion already packed.
Spain’s migrant amnesty was to blame. Liberal judges were to blame. The ECHR was to blame. Sánchez was to blame. Open borders were to blame, although the border was closed again within hours and almost everyone who crossed it was returned.
The possibility that Morocco had allowed or encouraged the crossing received much less attention. That explanation is inconvenient because it turns the migrants from invaders into instruments.
The Financial Times reported evidence pointing towards some official Moroccan role. Migrants said Moroccan guards had waved them forward. Some claimed police had told them to go to Spain. Riccardo Fabiani of the International Crisis Group said the evidence suggested “some sort of Moroccan official role” intended to send a message.
Morocco disputes Spanish sovereignty over Ceuta. It has also learned, as have other states on Europe’s borders, that migration control creates political leverage. Stop people and you are a useful partner. Allow them through and European governments panic.
Spain knows this. Its interior minister was careful not to accuse Rabat, calling Morocco an “absolutely reliable partner”. Dependence requires tact.
The immediate trigger may have been false claims about a Spanish Supreme Court ruling. Messages spread online saying the border was open and that people entering by sea could not be returned. Some of those who crossed appear to have believed they could pass through Ceuta and into Europe. They found soldiers, closed shops and no route onwards.
One Moroccan man told the FT that he had wanted to emigrate for years. After two days in Ceuta, he had changed his mind. “We were exploited,” he said.
That sentence does more to explain the crisis than all the references to The Camp of the Saints.
The Daily Mail sent Ian Gallagher to Ceuta. His report opened with a man called Sid Ahmed Dib staggering from the sea and collapsing at the feet of a soldier. Dib had swum for four hours. He carried his damp Algerian passport in a plastic bag. He drank water, sobbed and said that he hoped to reach Madrid or Paris.
Gallagher admitted that Dib did not look much of a threat. He then challenged any liberal progressive to witness the scenes and continue to support open borders.
The border had not been open as a matter of policy. There had been a sudden mass crossing, possibly encouraged by Morocco, after false claims circulated about a Spanish Supreme Court decision. The Spanish government deployed soldiers and police, returned tens of thousands of people and installed barriers in the water. If this was the open-borders utopia, it had acquired an unusually large military presence.
The Mail described migrants “lurking” on street corners and laying siege to shops. Residents were said to be cowering in their homes. Litter appeared repeatedly, as though discarded cans and wrappers settled the larger argument.
Fear was real. It should not be mocked. Nor should it be turned into a theory of what happened.
Nobody disputes the pressure that more than 60,000 arrivals placed on a small city. What needs explaining is why Spain was caught unprepared after the smaller Ceuta crisis of 2021, how Morocco was able to let the border collapse, and how false claims about it spread so quickly online. The point is that the system failed again.
Zia Yusuf of Reform UK was one of the first far-right politicians to jump on a plane and exploit the crisis. He was followed by members of Spain’s far-right Núcleo Nacional, whom police escorted straight back out of Ceuta.
The far right had little interest in why the system failed. Ceuta offered something more useful. It joined several of its favourite arguments in one place.
There was the “Great Replacement”. Not forgetting the civilisational struggle between Christianity and Islam. And the the claim that human rights law had made national defence impossible. Another favourite was the cowardly liberal elite, unwilling to protect its own people. There was even a demographic post declaring that overpopulation was not a global problem but an African and South Asian one.
This is where the migration argument is heading. It is no longer confined to numbers, or the pressures on housing or public services. Those remain the public-facing case. Behind them sits a harsher account in which population itself has become a weapon and millions of people are treated as surplus humanity pressing against Europe’s walls.
Even Richard Tice’s attack on the Archbishop of Canterbury belongs somewhere in this landscape. The Archbishop had visited Cape Coast Castle and spoken of the Church’s involvement in the slave trade. Tice replied by praising Britain for abolishing slavery and accused the Church of wasting money on “woke virtue signalling”.
It was not about Ceuta, but the logic was the same. Empire becomes a story of British virtue, while migration becomes a story of invasion. Christianity is left guarding the border, with little interest in why anyone tried to cross it.
By Saturday, the people presented as an invading force were queuing to return through the same border they had crossed. Some had been in Spanish territory for less than two days. They had not conquered Ceuta. They had not reached mainland Europe. Many had barely eaten.
The online right had already moved beyond them. It had found Raspail’s armada, Camus’s replacement, Sellner’s hidden migrants and Parry’s Islamic raid. The men on the beach were no longer needed.
The images came first. The route, the intention and the war were added afterwards.
Then the migrants went home, leaving the war behind.
Thanks for reading Anti-Capitalist Musings. It is a small operation, and I hope it offers something worth your time. There will be no premium subscriber content here: everything published will remain free to read. If you value these pieces and want to support the writing, buying me a coffee helps fund media subscriptions and the books that keep the analysis grounded. Every contribution, however modest, is genuinely appreciated.
Great article again Simon. Thanks.
It does worry me that the stories the Right are telling are so dominant and there is no Left/socialist stories that challenge it and provide positive solutions.
Unfortunately the the only explanations from the Left include conspiracy theories - but may be with elements of truth - (Israel/US/Zionists/Morocco are deliberately creating the crisis), or real explanations based around poverty in the global South (and massive inequality compared to the the north) and the effects of global heating (but this is also what the Right are also saying, but with a different conclusion) .
But what programmes is the Left proposing? What are the alternative narratives from the Left?
The contrast between the physical return and the rhetorical afterlife is the essential point. The record is strongest when it separates three things: the movement itself, the institutional choices that shaped it, and the political life of the images afterward. The return also complicates any single-motive story: hunger, lack of shelter, blocked onward travel, and renewed containment all mattered. The deaths and provisional counts deserve the same care as the rhetoric. I am writing about this in Everyone Will Return: Forty-Eight Hours at Ceuta.